They passed and signed a flurry of new legislation before Congress went into recess Friday night – thus giving the lie to the notion that the president was a powerless lame duck. Then Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist announced he would support federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research – going against Bush and setting up a confrontation that made it seem like maybe the president was a powerless lame duck.

After all, he couldn’t even get the Senate leader – whose ascension to the top job there was arranged by the president’s people two years ago – to hold off a little while so as not to step on the good Republican news last week.

Then, yesterday morning, the president exercised his powers to put John Bolton in as U.N. ambassador by means of a “recess appointment” – a constitutional peculiarity that allows presidents to fill jobs when Congress is out of town. By exercising his authority in this matter, the president was making it clear he was no powerless lame duck.

Meanwhile, presidential political adviser Karl Rove has been distracted by the hailstorm of news stories suggesting all manner of evil when it came to the exposure of a CIA operative named Valerie Plame. The political purpose of these attacks is to incapacitate Rove, the most effective political player Washington has seen in a decade or more – which will, it is hoped, turn the president into a powerless lame duck.

And maybe to some effect. Last week, the White House did something politically stupid and governmentally damaging when it released all kinds of confidential Executive Branch papers written by Supreme Court nominee John Roberts in deference to Democratic senatorial demands. Those demands are merely covers for a huge digging expedition, the hunt for the perfect negative memo that might derail the nomination.

That peculiar and unnecessary decision establishes a dangerous precedent that Congress has the right to examine internal documents from its co-equal branch of government just because it wants to. One wonders if a Karl Rove at the top of his game would have seen this and prevented it, and whether a Karl Rove on the phone with his own lawyer five hours a day might not be able to keep up with these things.

At the same time came word that the economy is roaring. In the second quarter, gross domestic product rose at 3.4 percent, a number that is sure to be revised upward closer to 4 percent. The unemployment rate stands at 5 percent, 10 percent lower than it was on Election Day. More people are employed in America today as a percentage of the population than ever before.

A few days later came word that people had gone on a huge buying spree in June, thus depleting business inventories and assuring that manufacturers were going to be making a lot of new product in the coming months – suggesting that economic growth might go as high as 5 percent for the rest of the year.

Surely a president who is presiding over such an economy is no lame duck, right? Well, no, because a Rasmussen poll indicates that nearly a third of the American people think the economy is in recession. Clearly, if the American people believed that Bush had brought them unprecedented prosperity, nobody would even think to use the words “lame duck” in connection to him.

What does it all mean? First, of course, it means that the president and the nation are paying a price – a proper price – for the ongoing suffering and difficulty encountered by our troops in Iraq. At a time of war, when 130,000 Americans are in harm’s way, we shouldn’t be dancing around celebrating our good fortune, and we’re not.

It also suggests, I’m afraid, that the Bush administration is still suffering from the only truly politically boneheaded choice it has made these past 4 ½ years – to center its second term on Social Security reform. By spending months arguing that we were heading into financial crisis at some point in the future, the president ended up inadvertently talking down the undeniable positive glow of the present moment in domestic affairs.

He hasn’t gone lame, but with Social Security reform, you just have to say Bush shot himself in the foot – and he’s got a bit of a limp.